And the December issue of The Atlantic states that

men whose wives out earn them actually do a smaller share of housework than their breadwinner peers.

Oh yes, I have anecdotal evidence in spades that confirms this observation. It is obvious why this happens. Men’s primary gender identification still comes from financial and professional success. If their partner is doing better in these areas, they often try to protect their manliness by avoiding what they see as women’s work.

This will, of course, change but not immediately.

In November’s issue of The Atlantic, Karl Taro Greenfeld asked if the readers could imagine “a profession in which employees spend all day at the office, work four or so hours afterward on homework, and still have work to do over the weekend.”

It is sad, indeed, to see a journalist who is so out of touch with the realities of contemporary workplace. Everybody I know works this way, and I don’t mean only people in academia.

N works at a company that creates medical software. He is required to improve his professional skills by way of obtaining programming certifications in new computer languages. He is also expected to publish his research. All of this has to be done on his own time. So he comes home from work, has dinner, and then works some more because that’s what he needs to do to keep his job.

My sister has her own small business, and this means that she has to work well into the night every day. Even on vacations, she has to be plugged in and working.

I don’t know if there are any white-collar jobs left where people put in their 8 hours a day and do ok more work.

In the locker room at the gym, two elderly ladies were engaged in a very loud conversation while I was changing behind a curtain. The cheery subject they chose for their morning chat was dead husbands.

“. . . And when she woke up, he was lying there DEAD. He was completely cold and blue, so he must have been DEAD for hours!”

“. . . And when she went outside, he was lying in the snow DEAD. He’d slipped and broken his neck!”

“Gosh, this is probably the most morbid subject they could have chosen at this early hour,” I thought.

As if to prove me wrong, the women switched to an even juicier topic: dead babies.

“She gave birth to a perfectly healthy baby boy but 3 months later he just DIED!” one of them vociferated gleefully.

“. . . The baby was born premature and only lived for two days,” the second woman chimed in.

When I emerged from behind the curtain, the ladies looked at me inquisitively.

“Do you have any stories about sudden death?” one of them asked in an eager voice. “I’m sure you do. Everybody has heard a story or two about somebody who just DIED all of a sudden.”

I wanted to tell them that I knew a story about this woman whose baby died and then there were two elderly ladies who aggravated her at the swimming pool. And then these ladies were found in the locker room and they were DEAD. They were completely blue and cold and had probably been lying there for hours.

But I’m not cruel, so I just wished them a nice morning and left.

Reader Kathleen asks:

I know you mentioned this in passing before…something about different personality traits being expressed by one person when that person speaks a different language? Could you expound on that a little bit? Did you do a post about it and I missed it? I am terribly interested.

After 6, 092 posts, I have no idea what I have written, so if I’m repeating myself, please forgive me. I definitely have a different persona for each of the languages I speak well.

The Russian-speaking Clarissa has the best sense of humor of all. (You are missing some linguistic brilliance, people.) I use a lot of puns and verbal acrobatics. My Russian is very adverbial. I never managed to perceive Russian as fully my own and treat it like a stranger I will never fully comprehend. Since I’m not emotionally attached to it a whole lot, I welcome a lot of experimentation with the language and eagerly adopt neologisms. Russian is very poor vocabulary-wise, so I invent many new words and use a variety of suffixes (not prefixes, though) to enrich it and create my own version of the language.

The English-speaking Clarissa is the least emotional of all. My English-speaking persona is the most competent and organized. I feel very protective of English and suffer almost physiologically when people mutilate it.

The Spanish-speaking Clarissa gesticulates a lot, swears a lot, and is either emotional or mumbly (which are simply two sides of the same coin.) Also, Spanish makes me feel manly. It’s hard for me to figure out why that is but I really feel like a man when I speak the language.

Do you have different personae for the languages you speak?

I just saw the following statement on my Facebook wall:

My students do not all understand why I say that the point of studying history is not to figure out who was good and who was bad.

This is so true. My students drive me to distraction with questions about who were “the bad guys” in every event we discuss. Whenever I say that “this was more complicated than that”, they seem to think I’m trying to hide my ignorance about what we are discussing.

My blogroll is populated by long, passionate and painfully earnest posts on whether Santa is white or Greek. Which, apparently, is not white.

Maybe it’s time to inform people that Santa is not real.

I’m reading a textbook on the history of Spain’s economy, hence the preceding post. I thought the book would bore me to death but it turned out to be more fascinating than a good mystery novel. I barely even blog because I’m so engrossed in this book.

I really envy the scholars of the past who had encyclopedic knowledge and cultivated it their entire lives. Of course, it is entirely possible that such scholars never existed and I’m pining for a fantasy of my own making.

In the XIXth century, Spain was a predominantly agrarian, desperately poor, and miserably illiterate country. It lagged behind other Western European nations in terms of urbanization, industrialization, development of capitalism, spread of literacy, and women’s rights.

The peasants of the Meseta (the central part of Spain which is arid and infertile) managed to gather just enough crops to survive and sell a tiny little surplus if the year was good. Their grain was of inferior quality and quantity and couldn’t even begin to compete with imported grains from more technologically developed countries.

The government protected the peasants by imposing very high tariffs on imported grains. This spared the peasants the severe trauma of having to abandon the only way of life they had ever known. They could continue existing in familiar penury and weren’t forced to leave the barren land and move to the cities.

These protectionist policies prevented a lot of immediate suffering but caused serious long-term issues.  The world wasn’t standing still while Spain clung to its patriarchal agrarian existence. In 1936, the conflict between terrified peasants and angry workers, oppressed women and a backward Church, the illiterate fearing change and the intellectuals ashamed of being so behind the rest of Europe finally exploded.

It’s easy to judge history from a comfortable distance of decades and centuries. Today, it is obvious that the small individual tragedies of dispossessed peasants were a necessary and unavoidable price that had to be paid for progress. However, the desire to put off suffering which may bring rewards in a far away future is also very understandable.

I asked the 3 people who were “co-teaching” my 3 courses with me the same thing.

“At the end of the semester, please send me the students’ grade for the lab.”

“Just the lab grade? Do you also need the number of the minutes they spent at the lab or the attendance sheets for the conversation group?” the instructors asked.

“No, just give me the grade, that’s all I need.”

To be on the safe side, I also sent the same short and seemingly simple request by email.

So how many of the instructors, do you believe, sent me the lab grade?

One.

The other two sent me a mountain of useless information which contained everything in the world except the lab grade. What is worse, the information they sent me was not conducive to figuring out the lab grade.

So I asked for the lab grade again. And again. In response, I got the lab minutes, the conversation group attendance, and God knows what else.

The only thing I didn’t get was the lab grade.

We keep complaining about our students’ incapacity to follow simple instructions but teachers are not much better.

P. S. If you are an academic, never consider going into administration. You will lose your faith in humanity and become bitter and cynical. People are great until you don’t have to supervise them.

Believe it or not, we have real snow.

And now I’m going driving in the snow. Scary!